Annoy your sound guy even more

“I can’t hear myself in the mix,” “yeah, man, I’ll be there at 8,” and “dude, we need like four more mics.” Each and every one of these words is documented in actuarial tables and doesn’t bode well for your sound tech’s risk of a stroke. Luckily, there’s an even better way to kill your sound guy and this time, it’s actually pretty clever.

[@dop3j0e] at the Stuttgart hackerspace Shackspace came up with the Noiseplug. It’s a very small build that could almost fit into a quarter-inch jack. It’s all SMD with a tiny (unknown) ATtiny9 microcontroller powered by a watch battery.

The music coming out of the Noiseplug is really interesting. All the code on the microcontroller is a one-liner written in C. Similar ‘algorithmic chiptune’ programs can be run on any PC: check out thesethreeexamples.

These potential entries to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest throw chars into an 8-bit PCM stream. Piping the output of these programs to /dev/audio would generate an actual song – written entirely in one line of C.

Of course, [@dop3j0e] could have made his Noiseplug a little less annoying, but sound techs are underappreciated for a reason, right?

Check out the Noiseplug in action after the break along with a few one-liner C songs.

I did think of phantom, but my goal was to get the plug as small as possible, and a big-ass XLR plug would have somewhat ruined the show. The annoy-your-sound-tech twist was added as a kind of afterthought.
A second iteration with phantom power and maybe a more powerful controller is a viable thought though ;)

I run the sound board at my church sometimes. Something like this would be very annoying, but as mentioned already it would be extremely easy for a competent sound man to isolate and silence it quickly.

Now, for some real fun plug it into the extra input line on some guy’s guitar amp.

for this to really annoy a sound person, Almost? is right. It would need to be built into several cables so that a simple swap test would be thwarted. As a sound professional myself, the noise is unique and not at all like anything you’d normally encounter with a ground loop or RFI. So it’d be a real head-scratcher.

I wonder if it might be possible for an algorithm to be written that would run this in reverse and read 8 bit music and return mathematical algorithms. so for instance you could input your favourite classic games theme tune and it would come back with two or three lines that would be 99% of the way there, supper compression (:

Damn i was up until 2am writing a PCM WAV generator in Labview that could atempt to play the single line functions. I must be missing sometihng because i cant get anything to sound as cool as the ones from the link.

The noise on the audio jack…i would kill someone if they did that to me. well id be pissed. Bad enough my guitar cables have to be jiggled sometimes to not make static noise. Random noise would not be fun…